When my partner and I decided to marry, on short notice on Dec. 23, he went into London’s city hall to get the licence, and we married Dec. 27 at a cost of $100. (Our painful separation cost much more.) I cannot imagine how journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s fiancee must be feeling, because while she waited for him to obtain papers for their marriage, he was killed and his body dismembered and hidden.

I hastened to read what Khashoggi wrote in opinion pieces for the Washington Post that incurred such wrath that somebody authorized a hit team to stake out the writer’s whereabouts and make him disappear.

A cursory exploration of Khashoggi’s opinion pieces for the American newspaper reveal we are similarly critical of Saudi Arabia’s human rights abuses.

A trifle concerned about the possibility of my torture and dismemberment in some far-off locale on a hoped-for world trip someday, I took a closer look at whether Khashoggi insulted the crown prince. (I haven’t.) MBS is only 33 years old. Surely he’ll grow up and learn hissy fits, like the abrupt decision to order all Saudi students out of Canada, have low payoffs.

I wrote columns critical of Saudi Arabia when the deal for Canadian-made light armoured vehicles was signed in 2014 under prime minister Stephen Harper. I doubled-down when the sale was expedited in 2016 under Canada’s lax arms export-control rules.

This year I wrote op-eds about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s dilemma – should he engage in tit-for-tat with Saudi Arabia? – and on Canada’s trade in conventional weapons (with yet another mention of arms sales to Saudi Arabia).

As a woman and a mother writing in Canada, might I experience a greater measure of leniency from the Saudis? Yet the male-hereditary kingdom overreacts with anger, as evidenced by over-the-top steps after a mild reprimand on Twitter from our foreign minister Chrystia Freeland, for unjustly imprisoning two Saudi women who criticized the regime.

I am reluctant, like Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer, to countenance the loss of jobs if Trudeau were to suspend or cancel the deal. (Figures on its worth range from $13 billion to $15 billion, with between 2,000 and 3,000 jobs at General Dynamics in London, Ont.) Trudeau says it could cost taxpayers as much as $1 billion to cancel or suspend the sale.

One powerful argument against ending the Saudi deal and sanctioning the country is cogently made by U.S. President Donald Trump. Like generations of arms dealers before him, Trump says if America’s US$110-billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia, worth hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs, is cancelled, the Saudis would buy elsewhere.

“Think of that, $110 billion. All they’re going to do is give it to other countries, and I think that would be very foolish,” he told reporters at the White House.

Trump believes Washington should not block military sales to Riyadh even if the allegations over Khashoggi are proven: “I actually think we’d be punishing ourselves if we did that,” he said.

We can believe that other countries, with weaker safeguards, will hawk their wares – and so arms races and proliferation continue. We are caught in a structural dilemma, with no way out except to “trust but verify” – as president Ronald Reagan reasoned when signing the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which Trump is about to cancel.

Caught in such dilemmas, proven strategies for citizens are to speak out, make our views known, be more transparent and “speak truth to power.”

But what dissident Saudis and Londoners say and do hardly matters. It may be more far-sighted and smarter to avoid such discussions, so our community gains financially on the backs of the oppressed.

Each year, the university students I teach have had a few Saudi nationals among them. I will never forget one go-getter who explained to us the travesty of the crown prince’s rise to power, and his subsequent clampdown on dozens of members of the Saudi elite, retained in a sumptuous hotel.

If bands of people, like that student, take courageous stands, the prospect of more countries cancelling arms deals, further scandal and worldwide abhorrence could lead to changes at the top of the ruling Al Saud family.

The German anti-Nazi group White Rose published leaflets opposing Hitler, a pitiful gesture in the face of totalitarianism, yet those young students will never be forgotten. Moderate tensions within Saudi Arabia are already escalating into a strategic game with war in Yemen, growing conflict with Iran, and power politics with the United States as well as Turkey.

Khashoggi’s bereaved son will no doubt be forever proud of his dissident father’s bravery. He will never be forgotten.

Erika Simpson is an associate professor of political science at Western University and the author of NATO and the Bomb and other scholarly publications.

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